FORBES - EX HOMELESS WOMAN MARY MURRAY INVENTING NEW HOMELESS BACKPACK "Once Homeless, Mid-Life Social Entrepreneur Works To Ease The Pain Of Living On The Street"
EXCERPTS:
Mary Murray remembers being homeless. She was 15 then, and she vividly recalls the constant fight to survive.
“Looking back I had to use some savvy skills to avoid rape, death and who knows what,” she said. “Along the way I always had someone older than me that could provide helpful ideas for my survival. I slept where I could, ate out of garbage cans, then I started work as a dishwasher in a five star restaurant. Yes I did eat the scraps the servers brought me on the dirty plates. But I bet I constantly ate better than anyone I know.”
Sometimes the choices were as difficult as the living conditions. She moved in with her grandparents, and managed to graduate from high school – but at the cost of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather. She moved in with a male friend and his father, but remained on the very edge of homelessness.
...Mary eventually got off the streets, met her future husband, and raised a child. But she remembers, still. And now at age 52, Mary Murray is a student at Miami Dade College ...Together with group leader Thang Kim, and another student, Sofia Suarez – both 20-year-olds – Murray is working on a project that centers around the creation of the NapSak, a new kind of sleeping back designed for homeless people; Kim is currently designing the prototype.
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